


Ignite

by Winterum



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends With Benefits, Hand Jobs, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 00:23:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5269550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterum/pseuds/Winterum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the part that Daryl savors, chews into with his canines. The watching, the waiting, seeing Rick thaw from the cold one layer at a time. It’s the heavy belt sitting on Rick’s hips that draws Daryl’s gaze, the way it leaves a faint imprint against the V of his pelvis. Every hard earned grunt and shiver from each other feels like a small victory and vengeance, because in the end, neither of them give in easily, even if it’s to each other.</p><p>But there are also nights when they hardly talk, and don’t touch at all. Seated opposite one another, or lying on something thrown on the floor to tamper the hardness. Just the rhythmic slick sound of stroking, and the quiet breathes that fill out the empty cell. Rick lost in his thoughts, and Daryl almost dozing, lulled by the odd pocket of peace, and the coiling wet smell of pre-ejaculate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignite

“Like one of them Northern breeds, you know? I’m talking all the way up, past the Yank states, and into the oh-fucking-Canada. With the thick fur coats and frigid eyes. Makes a man question if they aren’t more wolf than dog.” A murmur of agreement, and some dry chuckles to fuel the speaker on.

“Hey assholes, laugh all you want, I’m just saying it won’t be pretty to be on the other side of the fence. Heard he was a cop in the, well,  _back in the day_. Sick son of a bitch.”

Daryl runs the hard callus of his thumb over the edge of a tooth. Feels the hangnail out with his tongue, and bites. The chatter from around the corner of the prison continues on, devolving into morbid speculation and ill-humored stories.

Daryl raps his knuckles against the wall behind him.

“Y’hear that? Ain’t no one believes yer a good ol’ boy, singing the farmer blues, Rick.”

Daryl’s voice is leathery thick, and muffled from his hand. It travels like a soft husk, below the more distinct noise of people shuffling about in the prison – every footstep and conversation travelling and rebounding against the steel and concrete.

Rick shrugs, not paying the circulating gossip any attention. People like to spin tales when they’re scared, the new inmates they pick up are no exception. “Don’t need them to.”

He sits down next to Daryl, legs loosely drawn up, and elbows resting against his kneecaps. The cold of the floor seeps through the rear of his pants, and chills his skin. Rick shifts after a minute, vainly redistributing the hard contact of the ground against his buttocks.  

Daryl lowers his hand from his mouth, eyes shifting over with a shrewd once over. There’s something assessing about the gaze, and it draws Rick’s attention to the faint lines around Daryl’s eyes. Thin folds at the corners that lengthen his narrow gaze, and the spider web branching in bruise darkened eye pouches.

It never ceases to startle him- the knowledge that Daryl’s no younger than him. Maybe even older, if only by a few years. Yet it’s so much easier to assume the reverse, with Rick’s bearded jawline grey and haggard, and the weight of fatherhood pressuring his spine down into an ellipse.

“Nah, they ain’t stupid”, Daryl remarks with a sharp smirk, and coming from him, it’s practically a compliment, boxed, with a card on top.

Rick’s mouth curls humorlessly. Not for the first time, he wonders what Daryl sees with those once overs that straddle mockery and sincere appraisal. He used to bristle from those looks. Rick  _Gri-mes_ , last name stretched into a throaty sound of derision, used to dart his eyes over. Wary and calculating, hand poised to reach for his Colt, ready to shoot Daryl down like a rabid animal that's off its leash.

How time changes everything, how people and places, and loyalties change.

“Are we going to rock paper scissors it, again?” Rick asks instead, wetting his painfully dry lips. He knows they’re swollen and irritated from staying out all day, every day, with the sun beating down on his back, and stubbornness keeping him there.

Daryl scoffs, facial features expressive and shifting into irk. “S’once, alright man. Don’t recall you complainin’ none afterwards.” And damn right he made sure of that.

Rick shows his palms, mouth figuring out how to ease into a grin again. Lately, those seem far and in between, and it took some hideous  _effort_ to do what once came so easily to him.

“No complaints here, Daryl”, Rick assures steadily, leaning in close to hook his fingers into the rip of Daryl’s jeans. And that there, needed no contemplation, no deliberate rephrasing, because it  _was_  good. Daryl’s teeth marking territory on his shoulder, and a slow dragging pull on his cock, again and again until he came, spilling thickly into strong sure fingers.

Daryl eyes him, gaze sharp, and broad shoulders adding to the weight of the stare. The blue of his irises is nothing oceanic, but they’re striking in their own color. The hue of the day, as surrounded by forest, and shadowed by high rock. Paler than anything that could be promising or beautiful, but arresting enough.

Rick cocks his head so they lock gazes, thoughtful.

Years back, Lori had packed her suitcase to spend the summer at her parent’s lake house on the East coast. It was the week before school let out for Carl. He’d almost called her then, had six digits keyed in, and a line of argument ready on his lips. But then, he'd reached for the cruiser’s glove compartment instead. Hung up when dry paper rasped against his finger tips. The map was the same one left there three summers ago, ripped at the fold lines, yellow oil stains lining the corners.

For reasons that he can’t remember anymore,  _spite pride anger,_ he’d filled his trunk with camping gear, two duffels, and a pack of water. Spent the hard earned vacation leave in a haze, just him driving down the lone interstate –Transamerica, straight West-, Carl in the backseat asking if Colorado was as cool as Florida’s amusement rides, if mom was going to meet them there. 

There was only the ever present horizon to guide their path forward, and that blue, that pragmatic blue to burn the ice out of his eyes and heaving chest.

A weight rests on his elbow, purposeful but not hard enough to startle. Rick blinks slowly, until the prison and the sparse artificial light come into focus, the greys and browns diffusing back into his vision. A murmur of people bidding their chorus of goodnights. The fall of plastic bath curtains over cell bars. Noise of the living renters his ears.

“Checked out on me back there, Grimes.” Daryl has his hands fisted in the back of Rick’s collar, his voice travelling somewhere from over Rick’s ears. “You gonna smash yer face into mine if I let go?”

“I’ll try to resist.” Rick pulls back from the grip, cracking his neck to relieve the burn of rigid tension. The prickling sensation spreads across his upper spine and shoulder muscles, quick as a whip. “Kind of want to get up from the floor.” He’s cold from his tailbone to his ankles, and a numbness is setting into his toes.

Daryl brushes off the back of his pants, standing from his crouch with an easy grace. He hikes up an eyebrow when Rick moves to his feet gingerly, wincing at the pin and needles.

“We gonna go rendezvous some or ya need a lie down?” A jerk of the head to emphasize his point.

Rick pauses, then snickers, voice catching in his throat at the odd jumble of French syllables. As he opens his mouth for a sly  _thought the point was getting laid_ , Daryl turns around and glowers him into submission.

They’re well past the point of Daryl speaking with his hands, a discomfited twitch to his eye, but he still embarrasses easily when Rick uses his own words against him. Which only happens, only ever can happen under the cloak of the night, in a fit of daring and release.  

Their boots tread quietly past empty cells, distance marked only by the dim light bulb far and few in between. Daryl’s eyes dart out, scanning left and right for any unwanted voyeurs. His movements are silent and limber. Jaw clenched, and cheekbones shadowed, Daryl’s face is as mean and narrow as a coyote in the darkness. Rick follows his lead, always with a heady trepidation filling his veins.

They’d been almost caught once while grappling at one another’s threadbare bodies, ears filled with only grunted breathes and the loudness of blood in lust, in fight or flight. He remembers the way Daryl had rolled him over, and slapped a hand over his mouth. The staggering pleasure that had flooded his nerves, and the sweat that shone on Daryl’s back like the first mist of spring.

The two of them have no illusions about what this is. It’s the least, the very least they can offer one another. Tension and release, even if every ‘I need you’ is on the table. Because that solemn commitment is too dangerous, too unpredictable, and Rick treads thin ice as it is. Every loss dials him back past the starting point, into the realm of seeing things that aren’t there and doubting the ones that are.

Daryl offers himself like a lighter instead, a steady snick of a flame to balance the cold of his heart. They aren’t Maggie and Glenn,  _no one’s_  Maggie and Glenn, but them especially. Not with their scars and histories and losses.

Daryl watches him silently, chest barely moving, as Rick drags the collar of the shirt over his head. A long stretch of arms and abdomen that embodies the slow tick of each second in a minute itself.

This is the part that Daryl savors, chews into with his canines. The watching, the waiting, seeing Rick thaw from the cold one layer at a time. It’s the heavy belt sitting on Rick’s hips that draws Daryl’s gaze, the way it leaves a faint imprint against the V of his pelvis. Every hard earned grunt and shiver from each other feels like a small victory and vengeance, because in the end, neither of them give in easily, even if it’s to each other.

But there are also nights when they hardly talk, and don’t touch at all. Seated opposite one another, or lying on something thrown on the floor to tamper the hardness. Just the rhythmic slick sound of stroking, and the quiet breathes that fill out the empty cell. Rick lost in his thoughts, and Daryl almost dozing, lulled by the odd pocket of peace, and the coiling wet smell of pre-ejaculate. 

 “Said you was a Northern bred sonnuva bitch,” Daryl comments, a non sequitur thrown into the air between them, eyes resting on the plane of Rick’s stomach. He parts his knees just enough for Rick to stand in between them. The movement strains the fabric, outlining his crotch. Not hard yet, but getting there.

Rick cocks his head, nostrils flaring just the slightest. “You think that too?”

Daryl snorts, shaking his hair free from Rick’s loose grip. “S’not that, dumbass”, he grouses, but declines to elaborate. Instead, he slips his hand around Rick’s hips, palming the firm ass and pulling Rick in closer.

Rick moves with the grip, until Daryl’s nose is pressed against his belly. The warm air turns moist when a mouth parts and closes over skin. There’s none of the expected bite, but Rick feels a testing scrape of teeth nonetheless. His stomach muscles contract reflexively.

“S’not that, Rick”, Daryl mutters into his skin. Rick cards his fingers through dark hair, slow and almost weightless. Thin lips move over his abdomen, nuzzling into the first dusting of pubic hair. Rick knows what Daryl is saying, even as he moves his tongue and purses words against hard flesh. Syllables disappearing as eyes are lowered, and finger nails dig hard into his waist. Every bit of concern and warning and conviction etched into white crescent curves.

Daryl softens the edge of his teeth with lips, but there’s nothing to gentle Rick from the scratch of a sparse beard. The drag of it, every so often, over the sensitive skin of his navel and inner thighs is enough to keep him on edge, and painfully alert. But Rick can’t fist his fingers and pull Daryl away, or drag him even closer to avoid that burn. It’s what he wants, what he needs, and what Daryl doesn’t hesitate to give.

The sound of his cock sliding in and out of Daryl’s mouth is wet and erotic, but never too loud to be deliberate. Rick half amusingly still remembers Daryl jacking his own dick in one hand, eyes barely open, reluctantly being pried of his secrets.  _Ain’t never liked the, the fucken moanin’ and screamin’ shit, s’ like some, ah, damn horror show._

When Rick’s knees start quivering, Daryl grunts against him, and wraps a strong arm along the back of his legs. The strip of heat seers his skin like metal, jolting him forward into mouth, throat, and cavernous smooth heat. He can’t do anything but hiss, biting at his mouth to keep quiet, and yet, it still slips through his teeth,  _Daryl_ , three times like a wretched prayer.

 

Rick can’t burn on his own anymore. At least not now, not when ice has lined his spinal cord, and death has kissed his fingers and toes. His meridians are potent with violence where spirit used to be. Leaves will turn color, their crops will die, rivers will thaw and freeze before the name Rick Grimes sounds familiar and right again.

But until then, until that part of humanity returns to him, Daryl ignites him, instead. And together they wait. Rick closes his eyes, a soft  _ah_  falling from his cracked lips. 

In these moments, he’s molten.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this. As always, I'm grateful for every single one you who makes it all the way down here. This story will be linear, but only in a very loose sense. Probably better described as a series of couplings, or just a whole lot of tumbles between the sheets.


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